Analogous Colors - Kissing Cousins or Noisy Neighbors?

For this seventh installment of my weekly design series, I'm continuing along with the color wheel, this time looking at Analogous Colors. 

Analogous Colors are next door neighbors on the color wheel.  They go together quite naturally due totheir close proximity.  In fact, sometimes it can be hard to decide where one color leaves off and the next begins. 

Take the paint color Cadmium Yellow Medium for example.  Is it really, truly yellow, or is it orange?  My eye tends to say it's the later, especially when compared to the bright, sunny shade of Lemon Yellow. 

A quick peak at the two color charts to the right and you'll see what I mean.  That's where the 12-step color wheel comes in handy.  In my world, I label Cad Yellow Med yellow-orange and count it good.

But from paint mixing terms, you can see that it is a yellow, because when mixed with blues I get a series of green intermediaries, not browns or neutrals (this is something I'll revisit again next week when I talk about complimentary colors). 

Cad Yellow Medium and Lemon Yellow are also great examples of warm and cool hues of the same color.  I'll let you guess which is which. 




Here are a couple of other Analogous Color Combos from my painted color studies. 

Cadmium Yellow Med again, this time paired with Napthol Crimson, which is a fun red with a bit of blue undertones. 

The vertical swatch of red in the top right hand color is an unmixed example of the crimson.  Mix it with just the teensiest bit of cad yellow and you get the bold red of the horizontal stripe.

So warm and yummy!  You could totally turn this into a fall color scheme.

The purples in this mix are quite warm, indicating that both the red and blue had distinct red undertones.  

This color combo is very dramatic, and makes me think of Flamenco.   Probably because the purply reds make me think of shadows in the ruffles and flounces of a flamenco dress. 

Here's my Spanish Dancer freeform peyote bracelet again.  I debated adding it to this post, but I just couldn't write a post about analogous colors and not include it.

It's has an extended range, encompassing half the color wheel from yellow-orange all the way through to violet, but it's definitely an analogous color combo in the ways that the colors flow from one to the other. 

And here's one of my little Fancy Fish.  I made this one for my husband, so I was going for more masculine colors, so I stuck with the blue/purple sides of the color wheel. 

It's almost the same colors as a Japanese fighting fish (except its fins were a deep purple-black) I had in college and I figured, what could be more masculine than a fighting fish? 













So now it's your turn?  What are some of your favorite analogous color combinations?  I'd love to see them.